Order Manager

Overview

The Order Manager is where you review, manage and process orders from your store. This could be part of your daily tasks for processing new orders, customer service over the phone or e-mail, or any number of things that would require viewing the details of a specific order.

Many stores have automated their order management process though an integration with other systems, such as an ERP. If this is the case for you, working with the order manager may be new to you, or only necessary for customer service issues.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

Have access to your Hotcakes store administration
Have one or more orders placed

Getting Started

You won't be able to completely follow along with the content of this article until you have at least one order placed in your store.

You'll find the Order Manager in the Orders menu of the control panel.

Interestingly, the order manager is actually every page in the Orders menu, except for "+ Add Order." The pages are simply preselecting some of the filters you see in the left panel of the Order Manager.

For the most part, the pages you see here will directly or indirectly align with the various statuses that orders may be in.

Page	Description
Order Manager	By default, this page will show you all of the orders in your store regardless of status, beginning with the most recently placed order. If you choose any filters in this view, they will be remembered temporarily if you leave this page and revisit again later.
New	This page will show you all orders that have been placed, but have not yet been updated by any other workflow. These orders often will be unpaid, unless your store is set to immediately capture funds.
On Hold	Orders that have been placed on hold will be shown here. This may happen automatically due to your fraud screening settings, or manually when one of your staff wants to indicate that an order should not be processed.
Ready for Payment	This listing will load any orders that have been placed, but it still is either unpaid or partially paid.
Ready for Shipping	In this instance, you'll see a listing of all orders that have been paid in full, but not yet shipped (if the order has shippable line items).
Completed	Any orders that have been completely paid and shipped will be loaded in this version of the order manager view.
Cancelled	If you have any cancelled orders, you can load them by choosing this page. Cancelled orders are usually only placed in this status manually by a member of your team, or through an integration. This may occur with orders that experienced an error in payment during checkout, but the error was never resolved.
All Orders	This view is the same as the main Order Manager view, when you first select it. All orders are shown without any filters applied.

Order Search & Filter (left panel)

The order manager consists of a left panel and a right panel. The left panel gives you the ability to search for and filter orders in the store. It also a few administrative options, as shown below.

Setting	Description
Search	When you enter a value into this textbox, the system first attempts to determine what kind of value it is and adjust the search algorithm accordingly. If the value is purely a number, it will attempt to find any orders that directly match that number. If the value contains an @ symbol, it will assume that the value is an e-mail address and attempt to find any orders placed by customers with that e-mail value. Next, if the value begins with a number, any orders will a billing or shipping address matching the value will be returned. If none of those conditions are met, then your search value will be applied openly to customer e-mail, billing, and shipping addresses. In all of these cases, the search will be partial, which doesn't require you to have a direct match. For example, you can enter a value such as "@example" to find all orders that match customers in a specific company. Or you can enter "951" and any orders with "951" in the number will be returned (e.g. 9512, 8951, 789512, etc.).
Orders (filter)	The values you see here will directly match the menu options in the Orders manu. Please see the table above for a listing and description of these options.
Payment (filter)	The possible payment status values in this filter include: Unpaid, Partially Paid, Paid, and Over Paid. These values will look at the order grand totals and compare that value to the payment transactions that have been made so far.
Shipping (filter)	You'll find that these values match values found in other areas that use shipping status. The definition of each option here doesn't change.
Date Range	You can filter the orders being returned based upon the date that they were placed.
Newest Items First	This checkbox will always be checked by default. When checked, the orders will always be sorted so that the most recent order is always shown at the top.
Print Selected Orders	This drop down list works together with the checkboxes in the order listing and the button below it labeled, "Print." The drop down list will contain the e-mail templates for Admin Order Receipt, Order New Receipt, Order Shipment, and any custom e-mail templates you might have added.
Export to Excel	This button will pull together all orders that have been returned from the search, regardless of the number of pages and the page shown, and make them available to you in an Excel file. Please be aware that the more orders you have returned, the longer it will take for the Excel file to be generated and presented to you for download.
Export to Quickbooks	This button will do the same thing as the Export to Excel button above, but the resulting file will be in a format expected by the Quickbooks import process. You can learn more about the Quickbooks export feature in our documentation.

Batch Buttons

You also might see some batch buttons like the "Accept all New Orders" button you see below. They'll appear, depending on the filters you have applied. There are a couple of batch buttons that you might see, and they're described below.

Button	Description
Accept All New Orders	When you click this button, all orders that are found in the system that are still in the Received order status will be updated to the Ready for Payment order status. You will then be redirected to the "New" order manager view.
Charge All & Mark for Shipping	In this instance, all orders that are currently in the Ready for Payment order status will have any payments that are held captured. Next, if the order is paid or overpaid, it will be marked as "Complete" if shipping is already completed, or "Ready for Shipping" otherwise. You will then be redirected to the "New" order manager view.

Order List (right panel)

The right panel will show the results of your filters that have been applied in the left panel, even if those filters were simply preselected by the menu option you chose. This grid works the same as any other grid that you see and user in the e-commerce administration area.

Column	Description
All	This column contains a checkbox for each order you see. The "All" header is clickable, allowing you to check or uncheck all of the orders shown currently on the page. When you check an order, it marks it for the print or e-mail actions in the left panel. Each checked order will be printed or e-mailed, depending on what you clicked.
Order #	This is the order number that was assigned to the order when it was placed by the customer. If you have the sample data in your site still, you'll see "Sample Order" instead of an order number. If you click on the order number, you'll be taken to the Order Details view.
Date	The date you see here is the date the order was placed.
Amount	This value will be the grand total of the order that the customer will pay.
Customer	You'll see the name of the customer that placed the order in this column. Clicking the name will result in you being able to immediately e-mail the customer using your preferred e-mail program.
Status	The status will be shown in a visual and textual way, described in more detail below. Clicking on the payment icon will take you directly to the payment view for that specific order. The shipping icon will direct you to the order shipping view. The status icon and text will bring you to the order details view. All of these views allow you to also navigate to their other respective views for the order as well.
[no name]	This action column contains a single action, which is to view the order details. From there, you can view/process payments, edit the order, and process shipping actions as well.

Order Status Column

In general, when you look at the icons in this column, grey means no action has been taken or is required yet. Green is good, yellow is a warning, and red is bad. The text value will be the actual order status that the order is in. The icons are described below.

Status	Text	Description
	Unpaid	This icon should only be shown when there hasn't yet been a payment made towards the order.
	Partially Paid	This represents a partial payment. You'll see this payment icon when there's been at least one payment transaction made towards the order, but the order still has a remaining balance to be paid.
	Paid	This is the ideal icon all store owners would like to see. This icon means that the order has been paid in full.
	Over Paid	When the payment icon is red, the order has had more money collected than was expected.
	Unshipped	You'll see the grey shipping icon displayed for orders that are completely non-shipping, or that require shipping but no shipments have been made yet.
	Partially Shipped	When an order is partially shipped, this means that your order requires multiple packages/shipments to be made, and there are more shipments to be made still.
	Shipped	The green shipping icon will tell you that the order has had all of it's packages shipped.
	N/A	The red shipping icon is not implemented and shouldn't be seen in your store.
	In Process	When you see this icon, the order is still being processed. It's either received, waiting for payment, or waiting for shipping.
	On Hold	The yellow icon will indicate orders that have been placed on hold.
	Complete	When this icon is green, you know the order has been completely processed. There are no more remaining payments or shipments.
	N/A	The red order status icon is not implemented and shouldn't be seen in your store.